Those of you who are familiar with musical history know that Pythagorean tuning is based on extending the ratio of a perfect fifth to create a complete scale. It still works for some current music, but sounds more odd to our ears the more chromatic a piece becomes. This composition is the result of a scale I calculated with the question- what if ancient people created a scale based on a series of perfect fourths instead? The result is a scale that sounds very naturalistic and familiar in certain intervals and chords, and completely exotic to western sensibilities in other intervals. While working on a project that led to this, a particularly large spider scurried across my desk, to which I shouted something that sounded similar to “You Jazz Spider.” The challenge in composing this was the syncopation, meant to suggest the difficult to predict eight-legged motion.
